Katz, Donald (1993, August). Triumph of swoosh. Sports Illustrated
     (pp.54-73).

                         Triumph of the Swoosh

    With a keen sense of the power of sports and a genius
for mythologizing athletes to help sell sneakers, Nike bestrides
the world of sport like a marketing colosus
                                   

   During the Olympic summer of 1992, just days before the Dream Team
was expected to receive its gold medals, the most casual of fans
learned that certain members of the team might ruin one of sports' most
hallowed rituals because of their preference in footwear. Officials of
the U.S. Olympic Committee announced that if Michael Jordan, Charles
Barkley, David Robinson, Scottie Pippen, John Stockton and Chris
Mullin--Nike guys making up half the superstar basketball team--did not
wear official warmups bearing the emblem of Reebok, the shoe company
against which Nike, Inc. has conducted a holy war for much of a decade,
they would not be allowed atop the medal stand. But Jordan and the
others refused to budge. 

As news of the standoff spread, phone calls began to stream into Nike
headquarters, Beaverton, Ore., most of them indicating that this time
the mighty shoe machine had gone too far. Here was a moment meant to
transcend the marketplace, an event indicative of sport's traditional
purity of purpose, yet a handful of highly paid athletes seemed willing
to deny the nation this experience because of loyalty not to the "glory
of sport" or the "honor of our teams" as the Olympic oath has it, but
to a company in Oregon that makes their shoes. 

    Barkley--a veritable Tocqueville when moved to observe a complex
social phenomenon and distill its essence--underscored the sense that
Mammon was about to triumph over patria in Barcelona by proclaiming
that he had "two million reasons not to wear Reebok," the number
referring to the dollars Barkley would receive during the year from
Nike (though Charles managed to double the actual sum). If Barkley had
more than a million reasons to refuse to be a human billboard for
Reebok, then Jordan was in the process of accumulating 20 million
reasons- $20 million over the course of a year for helping an athletic
footwear and apparel company mark the look and the feel and even the
popular fantasies of daily life as few organizations before it had
done.  

In a time when most Americans understand that Michael Jackson and
Michael Jordan share more than initials and a first name, an era in
which even most school kids realize that he doesn't wear a hat bearing
a Nike logo just to keep his head warm, word still reached Beaverton
that the Barcelona flap could destabilize the company's carefully
nurtured relationship with those who regard Nike as synonymous with
athletes and athletics. Seven years earlier, in the spring of 1985,
when the first Air Jordan commercial appeared on TV, many Americans had
never heard of a slender NBA rookie named Jordan. Then that spring a
basketball rolled across an urban court and a handsome kid in baggy
shorts standing at the center of the prime-time image caught the ball
off the toe of one of his technicolor shoes. He began to move across
the blacktop to the keening sound of jet engines revving before take-
off, and by the time the engines had roared at critical scream, Jordan
was aloft in B slow-motion tableau so magically drawn out that children
who couldn't generate the vertical leap to touch a doorknob could climb
right inside the moment.

Jordan stayed in the air, his legs splayed, for 10 seconds, enchanting
spectators who had never been to a basketball game. The 30 seconds of
film moved people all over the country up close to Michael Jordan's
genius and his grace, and because of a brilliant alchemy that has since
made Nike such a profound force in the culture, the shoes on his feet
became as magic carpets. So often since then have Jordan's singular
physical gifts been decorated with a superhero's mythos that it is now
difficult to locate a three-year-old--or, for that matter, a Trobriand
Islander or an Inuit hunter--who can't tell you that Jordan is a Nike
man. Schoolchildren recently surveyed in China agreed that the two
greatest men in history were Zhou Enlai and Michael Jordan, who plays
basketball for a living in Chicago, Illinois.

Inside Nike, Jordan and the dozens of other marquee athletes on its
team of "consultants" are living representations of the company's
belief in the highest moral tenor of athletic pursuit. "Michael holds
us to our values," Nike executives will say. Those values inform the
corporate goal of "enhancing people's lives through sports and fit-
ness." Over and over these executives proclaim that Nike's success is
predicated upon a commitment to "keeping the magic of sport alive."

Among the human passions that can be successfully draped over consumer
products--sex, rock 'n' roll, money, sports--all the nobility and
pathos of sport has been embraced by the people of Nike as an animating
principle and reason for being. The chairman of Nike, Philip Knight,
understands that the secret of Nike's success resides along a delicate
and emotionally charged progression that connects the company, the
consumers and the abiding fantasies that are tethered to sports. On
their way to the feet and the closets of the world, the shoes pass
through what Knight calls the "life force" of sport. Knight believes
that sport "is the culture of the United States" and that, before long,
it will define the culture of the entire world.

Knight and the other leaders of Nike were stunned by the perception
that Jordan's loyalty to the corporate cause in Barcelona was bad for
America and for sports. The whole idea of Nike had been to build a
pedestal for sports such as the world had never seen. Nike employees
labor for "an athlete's company," an organization run by and for
athletes. Although company officials acknowledge that six of 10 Nike
customers will never wear their shoes for their intended use, employees
still work with the intensity of athletes on a roll, to serve not the
consumer but the serious athlete who at least dwells in the imagination
of millions of people living in these muscular and sports-minded times.

With impressive speed Nike has come to signify status, glamour,
competitive edge and the myriad intricacies of cool. Especially for the
young. Nike shoes conjure up a yearning and fascination that for much
of the century has been inspired by cars. Just as generations coming of
age during a loftier moment for industrial capitalism dwelled on the
automobile, young people all over the world now grow up dreaming at
night of Nikes. The company receives dozens of drawings every week from
children who understand the technicalities of heel counters, crash pads
and functional grooves in the way that many of their fathers understood
overhead camshafts and four-barreled carbs. One eight~year-old scrawled
"The New Air Jet, just $303!" across the bottom of a drawing of a
combination basketball shoe and tactical-assault weapon that now hangs
in the office of a Nike designer. A "brand power survey" that Nike
commissions each year indicates that in a perfect world, the shoes that
7~o of the teenage boys in America want--as opposed to ones they
actually have or can afford--are Nikes.

Only weeks before Jordan and his Nike teammates sparked international
controversy in Barcelona, a new palace of shoes called Nike Town opened
in downtown Chicago. The 68,000 square feet of retail space is replete
with a basketball court, giant tanks of tropical fish and vivid Nike
imagery from ceiling to floor. Within a few weeks Nike Town had
supplanted the Lincoln Park Zoo and the Shedd Aquarium as the most
popular tourist attraction in Chicago.

The athletic shoe might seem to be an unlikely seminal artifact of
these last years of the 20th century, but that is clearly what it is.
The shoes have spawned the same sorts of popular obsessions and
high-profile companies inspired not so long ago by the airplane, the
automobile and the computer. And the shoes and all of the imagery and
emotion surrounding them have made Nike one of the great success
stories of the post-World War II era.

In the 10 years following the company's launch under the Nike name at
the 1972 Olympic track and field trials, in Eugene, Ore., sales grew at
an average rate of 82%, and profits doubled every year. Back in 1964,
when the company was a part-time fantasy of Knight's called Blue Ribbon
Sports, he sold only 1,300 pairs of running shoes from cars and card
tables set up at local track meets. This year Nike will probably sell
close to 100 million pairs of shoes--nearly 200 pairs for every minute
of every day.

A $2 billion company in 1990, Nike all but breezed through the recent
recession, its revenues almost doubling by 1993 to a sum as large as
that generated by all the ~V deals, tickets and paraphernalia of the
NBA, NFL and major league baseball combined. More than one in three
pairs of athletic shoes sold in the U.S. are Nikes Sales of the elite
line of eighth-generation Air Jordans alone dwarf all the basketball
shoe sales of Converse, the reigning shoe king of court and blacktop
not long ago. Nike's newer line of Robinson- and Barkley-connected
Force shoes and its Pippen-endorsed Flights account for more business
than all the basketball shoes sold by Converse and Adidas.

One of five Nike shoe sales is currently rung up outside the U.S.,
mostly in Europe, and within a few years company officials expect,
foreign revenues to surpass those in the U.S. Though the late Nike Air
Max model retails for 299 Dutch guilders in Amsterdam--more than $155--
the shoe is as essential to young people along the canals as
bell-bottoms were to young people in San Francisco 25 years ago. When
Nike recently opened up a small outlet in Shanghai, hundreds of people
waited in the dark for hours to be the first among the billion to own
all-American icons for the feet.

But Knight has always said that Nike's allure was tenuous, so when
enraged phone calls continued to pour into Beaverton in the wake of
events in Barcelona, he realized that the delicate balance of forces
responsible for Nike's success was out of kilter. There just wasn't
much he could do.

Knight hadn't gone to the Olympics, though he could have sat beside
princes and prime ministers. He often appears to underscore his power
by not showing up at major events. His habitual avoidance of the fray
has caused him to be characterized as shy or even eccentric, but his
distant style in no way compromises his determination to win every game
he plays. Knight manages the Nike empire by nuance--a raised eyebrow
here, the jingle of keys in his pocket there, a yawn. When he does
talk, he speaks in rapid-fire bursts, often punctuating lines with a
little humming noise or a laugh, as if he's already bored by a
listener's effort to catch up with his galloping cogitations.

As reports continued to come in from Barcelona, Knight realized that a
passing comment he had made five weeks earlier was probably responsible
for the situation. After the Dream Team tune-up at the Tournament of
the Americas in Portland, Ore., Knight had gone out for dinner with
Jordan. Jordan told Knight that Dave Gavitt, the president of USA
Basketball, had sprung the special medals awards outfit deal on the
players in the locker room after practice that day.

"I told him, 'Dave, I have a big problem with this,' " Jordan said to
Knight. "I said, 'We're like hired guns in this thing. Lets not pretend
we're anything else. All of us have endorsement deals. How can you have
sold these rights and expected us to wear these things?'" Jordan also
told Knight that Gavitt had vowed to "fix the problem."

"Good going," said Knight, though as the calls poured in, Knight wished
he had said something less rousing to his most famous part-time
employee. On the flight to Europe, Jordan noticed that one of the
clauses in a legal release Gavitt had asked him to sign required him to
wear the Reebok warmups on the medals stand. He crossed out and
initialed the offending clause. A few days later, on a flight to
Barcelona from the Dream Team's first stop, in Monte Carlo, Jordan and
the others were informed that they would indeed have to wear the Reebok
sweats on the stand if they wanted to get a medal. Jordan was still
furious when he arrived in Barcelona "No way I'm wearing Reebok," he
told reporters.

"Me neither," Barkley chimed in.

That residents of the Nike-consuming public assumed Knight to be in
control of the situation was not difficult to understand.
Orchestration, after all, is something Nike does as well as any company
in the world. While other sports-apparel companies offered hospitality
suites in Barcelona, Nike had converted a nightclub into an elegant
ring of quiet, enclosed "pods" in which athletes and other VlPs could
relax and chat. The place was full of fax machines and phones and food
and, as always, mountains of athletic apparel and shoes to give away.
But there was no joy in Barcelona when Jordan and the others decided to
take their anti-Reebok stance. Knight complained that the USOC was act-
ing as if he had "a magic wand "

Nike's director of sports marketing, Steve Miller, an ex-Detroit Lion
and former athletic director at Kansas State, huddled in Barcelona with
the company's chief pro basketball executive, Howard White, who had
been a point guard at Maryland in the early '70s and later coached
there. Howard talks to Jordan often and says he believes that "Nike and
Michael have become inseparable--like one thing, like one family."
White knew the public would not understand that Jordan's refusal to
budge had roots in a fight Jordan and Nike had been waging against the
NBA ever since Jordan turned pro.

Even before that first Air Jordan commercial aired, the league had
banned the shoe, and at the All-Star Game seven years later Jordan and
Nike were still battling the NBA. The league's caricature T-shirt for
the '~2 game showed only nine of the 10 All Star starters because Jordan
had legally "taken back his face" and transferred the rights to his
likeness and name to the company that was so instrumental in making him
universal.

Nike's association with elite U.S. athletes dwarfs that of any other
company. Of the 320 or so NBA players, 265 wear Nike shoes, 82 of them
by contract. Half the teams that have won the NCAA basketball
championship in the past 10 years have worn Nikes, and more than 60
big-time colleges are "Nike schools" because their coaches are Nike
coaches. Two hundred seventy five NFL players wear Nikes, as do 290
major league baseball players. If the medals won by the Nike track and
field athletes at Barcelona were added up, Team Nike would have beat
out the Unified Team.

The latest annual report from Nike all but drips with corporate rate
attitude, mocking "conventional wisdom" in light of the recent triumphs
of various Nike athletes; "No one will ever break [Bob] Beamon's long
jump record at sea level, Andre Agassi can't win on grass. Nolan Ryan
is too old. Communist athletes won't understand capitalist financial
incentives. A black man can never be a good company spokesman in white
America."

So while Nike piously proclaims that its mission is to protect the
lofty ideals of sport, the company also values iconoclasts with
big-time attitudes more than it does any national governing body or
league Nike executives love Barkley, Agassi, John McEnroe, llie Nastase
and even Deion Sanders--the kinds of athletes that embarrass grown-ups.
In the eyes of Nike, the McEnroe many observers consider to be spoiled
and immature is, in fact, an anti-elitist thorn in the side of a
hidebound tennis establishment. Asked about Sanders's dumping a bucket 
of water on sportscaster Tim McCarver during last year's baseball
playoffs, Nike president Dick Donahue asked, "What's wrong with that?"

When Knight started his business the dominant athletic shoe company was
Adidas, an elitist German concern that Nike's founding fathers thought
was deeply hooked into corrupt and aristocratic international sports
authorities. The Nike guys, on the other hand, were athletes--most of
them former competitive runners--and through their athletic pursuits
they had acquired "authenticity." The company is powered to this day by
a cultlike belief in authenticity. The word is repeated like a mantra
in Beaverton. Authentic shoes for authentic athletes.

But for all its reverence of its upstart past, Nike has grown up to be
a large and prominent institution. The company's anti-bureaucratic and
anti-authoritarian streaks--and even its dedication to gifted athletes
who swim against the tide--have lately become obscured at times by the
sort of faceless and morally questionable imagery more often associated
with corporate Goliaths like Exxon and General Motors. This was never
part of the plan.

Only eight weeks after the events in Barcelona, press reports emanating
from Charlotte, N.C., revealed another example of Nike's apparently
doing business in ways that were typical of other big, pro~it-minded
businesses. Shortly after the Charlotte Hornets had drafted
Georgetown's star center, Alonzo Mourning, a reporter aware of
Mourning's unusual shoe contract asked Mourning who he would be working
for during the coming season. "I work for Nike," said Mourning.

The sports-business grapevine spread the word that Nike was at it
again. Before the draft Mourning had signed a revolutionary agreement
calling for Nike to pay him a large guaranteed sum to play pro
basketball and endorse various products. Mourning says he was more than
willing to "let Nike experiment with me," as he later put it, because
Nike was the means by which an American athlete becomes what Mourning
calls a "household name."

Like Jordan and Barkley and Agassi before him, Mourning was after
something not deliverable by performance alone. ~hen it came time to
negotiate with the Hornets, Mourning held out, and fans and reporters
were quick to blame Nike. After a series of reports in the Charlotte
Observer indicating that Mourning might never play for Charlotte
because of the financial security Nike had already assured him, one
angry letter to the editor asserted that Nike's $16 million deal with
Mourning had "taken the spirit out of the game."

He finally came to terms with the Hornets in November 1992. Just a week
earlier a million-dollar ad campaign against Nike was announced by an
association of labor unions and manufacturers called Made in the USA.
The association had stated that consumers would be asked in magazine
and newspaper ads to send their "dirty, smelly worn-out" sneakers to
Phil Knight. The idea was to call attention to the loss of domestic
shoe-manufacturing jobs to low-cost foreign producers--which make
almost every branded athletic shoe sold in the U.S. and to repeated
accusations that third world factory workers making Nikes earn as
little as 14 cents per hour.

More than 20~ U.S. corporations are, in fact, larger than Nike in terms
of revenue, but it's hard these days to think of another company that
generates so much popular passion. National TV news programs picked up
on the mention of low wages and poor working conditions endured by Nike
workers abroad, and the Made in the USA campaign generated so much
publicity from the mere announcement of its intentions that the
association never bothered to run more than one ad.

"We've become a discrete set of values for our consumers," says Nike
p.r. director Liz Dolan, looking back on almost a year of incidents
that had in some ways marred the perception of the company. "Because
we're connected to sports, our success is perceived as something bad.
If a computer company in the Silicon Valley grew so quickly that
profits had doubled by the year, created thousands of new high-wage
jobs and delivered buckets of money to its shareholders the public
would be thrilled."

Seven years ago Knight proclaimed that "some company will become the
IBM of the sports-apparel industry within the next five years." ~But now
that Nike logos mark the landscape far more prominently than those of
IBM, now that Nike has risen above most of the other organizations
connected to sports, the corporate quest is to not become the
floundering IBM of the sports business. Nike is clearly the most
efficient and powerful organization in sports, yet it exists in a
hypercompetitive sphere that has been dominated by four shoe dynasties
over the past 25 years. Knight believes that these empires, unlike auto
or computer dynasties--but just like sports dynasties and batters on
streaks--tend to ascend to brief, Icarian moments. Make the mistake of
talking to a Nike exec about the company's "ownership" of half the
basketball-shoe market or 75% of the cleated-shoe market or 40% of the
running-shoe market, and he or she will break in with, "It's borrowed.
No market in this business ever is owned."

"The brand cycles in this industry last only around seven years," says
Knight. "You've got to reawaken the customer every season, yet there
are these larger cycles. First Converse had its day, then Adidas, then
Nike. The cycle took us from zero to a billion dollars in a short time,
and suddenly Reebok had its years in the sun. Then Nike was reinvented
during the late 80s, and now we're back on top."

"There is no doubt that this industry is looking for something new,"
Says Gary Jacobson, a Wall Street analyst who specializes in the
athletic-shoe industry. One of every three athletic shoes sold in the
U.S. may be a Nike, but the American market has become saturated. The
American closet is so full of colorful shoes that consumers tend to
replace only those that have worn out. Nike talks of the urgency of
deploying the "global power brand," of figuring out how to dominate the
imagery of sports abroad as in the U.S.

So much of Nike's public presence is hitched to the abbreviated careers
of its athletes that staying on top means establishing a presence at
every draft, in every sport or tournament and on every team. "If we're
a giant, then we're a pretty fragile giant," says Knight. "Every six
months is like a new life. We can't take our eye off the ball, because
if we lose it, we'll have a bitch of a time getting it back."

But as the company strives to maintain its lead, corporate imperatives
seem to collide with the perceived values that Nike claims it is
protecting. Nike has therefore become a lightning rod for all the
popular ambivalence about the convergence of American business and
American sports, and for an increasing uneasiness over the way sports
preoccupy the public consciousness. Lately it has occurred to Knight
that the sheer force of Nike's image-making has perhaps created
expectations capable of blindsiding the company--and Knight, as all who
know him confirm, is a man who likes to see what's coming.

It was a Japanese reporter who rose at the Nike' organized
press event in a Barcelona movie theater before the medals-stand
showdown. "Mr. Jordan," he said, "how does it feel to be God?" Jordan
grinned his famous grin and deflected the question, but over the next
several months, Nike's leaders began to wonder if, as Knight had said,
"the hype had finally gone too far."

"Do I think Nike creates images for athletes that exceed their capacity
to perform as athletes or even as people?" Knight says. "My short
answer is yes, but it's not just us. It's TV that defines the athletes.
They perform on television, and we just expand on t he image. Maybe
these two things do come together and create something that nobody can
live up to."
In 1988 Jordan was on the verge of leaving Nike to form his own
marketing company. Before Nike raised his guaranteed fee and increased
the equity portion of his deal, Jordan was at a meeting where, he
recalls, Knight said in a moment of pique, "Michael Jordan without Nike
won't mean anything."

But by 1992 Jordan was being asked how it felt to be God and was long
over his anger at Knight's words (which, Knight contends, were
misinterpreted in the first place). And after nine years with Nike,
Jordan says he has begun to weary under the weight of his image. "Nike
has done such a job of promoting me that I've turned into a dream," he
says "In some ways it's taken me away from the game and turned me into
an entertainer. To a lot of people I'm just a person who stars in
commercials."

Knight sent Jordan a written confirmation that he didn't consider the
medals-stand uniform a violation of Jordan's Nike contract. "But Phil
didn't realize how loyal I really am," says Jordan. "I think I
surprised him."

Before the medals ceremony Jordan said to his attorney, David Falk, "l
have to believe what I believe in." Jordan told Falk he was going to
put tape over the Reebok emblem in defiance of Olympic officials. "I've
got a better idea," Falk said.

So after a week in which Reebok had garnered more publicity from a few
cents' worth of contested thread than from all their millions of
dollars' worth of prime-time advertising, Jordan and his five fellow
Nike endorsers, as well as the six players under contract to other shoe
companies, all mounted the medals stand with their collars rolled back
to obscure the Reebok name. Jordan stood in the middle with Old Glory
draped over the emblem.

Gavitt was philosophical as the "incident" in Barcelona finally passed
into sports-hype history. "Michael was nothing but a superstar through
the whole thing" he said. "and d Phil Knight did everything he could to
help. But you've got to say one thing about those guys at Nike: Like
'em or not, they march to the beat of a very separate drummer."
Except that at Nike they don't really march. They all run like people
afraid of being caught from behind.

II. On Campus

At 8:30 a.m., Knight's black Acura NSX, sporting  a NIKEMN license
plate, growled through a gap in an earthen wall surrounding the 74
acres of the Nike World Campus. 10 miles west of Portland. Knight
readily admits to having a "thing" about cars. He's not into collecting
them--though he does have a Lamhorghini Diablo and a Ferrari Testarossa
and he did have a Porsche 911 Turbo until he racked it up last year. "I
get sleepy going slow," said Knight. "Fast is safer for me. I've
collected 85 speeding tickets over years of staying wide awake."

Then Knight flashed a huge grin, his ever-present Oakley sunglasses
reflecting in silver hues a panorama of the corporate Xanadu before
him. At times he has worn hair arrangements reminiscent of Little Lord
Fauntleroy, the early Beatles and a 15th-century monk, but these days
Knight--with his longish redblond curls, close-cropped beard and
wraparound shades-- looks for all the world, at age 55, like a
prosperous, if mellowed~ rock star. "I hear that people around here
say, 'Phil Knight is our Walt Disney, except he's not dead yet,'" he
said. "Kind of a compliment and an insult at the same time, I guess "

A few days earlier Knight's personal net worth had increased by nearly
$115 million in a single day due to a ~4.50 appreciation in Nike's
share price on the New York Stock Exchange. Four weeks before that,
when Wall Street analysts figured Nike's quarterly earnings would come
in lower than their original estimates, the stock price had shed $15
over four days, and the roughly 25 million shares owned by Knight lost
close to $390 million in value--a sum surpassing that spent on Nike's
legendary TV advertising over the past two years. "The first time the
stock lost $12 in a day it shook me up a little," Knight says, "but now
I've unlinked that stuff from personal feelings. Those numbers are just
. . . surreal."

Beyond a fountain leading from 48 flagpoles flying the colors of the
nations in which Nike conducts business, younger employees Gould be
seen walking to work beneath covered walkways that connect the John
McEnroe Building to the Alberto Salazar Building and the Dan Fouts
Building and the Bo Jackson Fitness Center beyond it. None of the young
soldiers of Nike wore a suit and tie like the boss, and many seemed to
be wearing shoes cooked up in the Nike labs--exotic sports sandals or
prototype footwear that in one or two cases wound around the lower part
of their legs, in the style of Roman centurions.

With its man-made lakes, stands of trees, ribbons of jogging trails and
buildings commemorating the life's work of individuals in some cases no
older than 35, the Nike campus is like a shrine to quality-of-life and
athletic pursuits contrived as a company town. Nike people refer to the
world outside as "the biosphere" or "the real world." "Beyond the
berm"--a reference to the close-cropped grass knoll surrounding the
campus--lies the America Nike serves and "enriches" through sports and
fitness. Inside the berm is Nikeworld, where almost everyone is fit and
healthy, where the company pays you extra to ride your bike to work
instead of driving, where nobody can smoke and where it's quite all
right to work out at the Bo Jackson Fitness Center for two hours at
lunchtime, because your entire department will probably be at work
until nine at night, nose to the grindstone.

The average age of a Nike employee is 31. The Joan Benoit Samuelson
Center is occasionally referred to as the student union building, and
when Nolan Ryan recently came to the World Campus for the dedication of
the building that bears his name, only a small crowd was present for a
ceremony featuring the pitcher because only employees older than 40
were invited.

On campus, employees can get a haircut, do their laundry, get a massage
or a complete fitness evaluation, buy Nike products and even shop in a
store stocked with the kinds of items appreciated by spouses or
children who haven't seen a long-laboring loved one in a while.
Carloads of Nike children can be seen being hauled around the Mike
Schmidt Building on their way to the Joe Paterno Day Care Center.

Despite the company's startling youthfulness, innumerable employees
talk of having opted for a new or second life in Beaverton. "I taught
English...." "I'm a reformed accountant. ..l "I was drafted by the
Chargers, but then I blew out my knee...." There are former lawyers who
once wrote Nike's briefs, former editors of trade magazines who once
covered the company, former politicos and a lot of former vagabonds and
ski bums. One executive, David Rikert, is a former Harvard Business
School professor who once wrote a case study about Nike.

Former pro and college athletes, former Olympians and near Olympians,
work on every floor of every building. Former distance runner Alberto
Salazar works down the hall from Rudy Chapa, another world-class runner
who occasionally beat Salazar during their college days. Company road
races and bike races are often won in near-world-class times. The sheer
athleticism of the corporate culture makes nonjock employees feel the
need to follow teams and scores as a matter of protective coloration.

After several rounds of grueling interviews, a recent candidate for an
important job managing Nike's environmental programs, a former
government official with both a Ph.D. and a law degree, was told by a
member of the selection committee that he had just one more question:
"Who's Deion Sanders?"

"Well, I don't really know," the candidate replied.

And that was the end of that.

Pro athletes still in their prime are dazzled by the World Campus.
Deion was recently supposed to be in Beaverton for a day, but he stayed
for three, working out for hours in the beautiful gym at "the Bo" and
hanging out with shoe designers to talk about sports gloves that would
protect his fingers when he slides and about shoes that could provide
the same support as the yards of tape that Sanders used to wrap around
his ankles and feet, outside his shoes and socks. (The practice, known
as "spatting," is anathema to Nike, which wants its shoes and logo to
show on TV.) For his part, Bo loves the campus scene so much that he
says he wants to retire to Beaverton and take a job at Nike. ("Yeh,
well Bo's crazy then," said Jordan when he heard this. "No way I'm
retiring to Beaverton, Oregon."

On the walls of the arcades connecting the three- and fourstory
buildings are bronze plaques bearing bas-relief images of athletes
whose greatness has been less than fully recognized but who epitomize
Knight's vision of the nobility of sport. Along the Nike Walk of Fame,
Charley Lau, the highly respected batting coach, shares a place with
triathletes and wheelchair road racers Lots of high-profile tough-guy
athletes like Franco Harris and the former lineman Lee Roy Selmon are
on the wall too.


Michael Doherty, who makes elaborate films and videos for Nike
conclaves and marketing events, booked talent for The Merv Griffin Show
before joining the company 11 years ago. Doherty has created hundreds
of films in the company's state-of the art production facility in the
Mike Schmidt Building Most of them are evocative works that mix the
music and imagery of rock videos with slow-motion sports highlights
culled from miles of footage. "I can build a whole show around a shoe,"
says Doherty. "It's not like you're ever short on emotional material.
You've got sports."

At Oregon in the late '50s, Knight answered to the name Buck. Buck
Knight was a pretty good middle-distance runner on a track team
possessed of some of the fastest U.S. milers. He once ran a 4:09 mile,
but he was still a "squad" runner, a team guy who was always ready for
the dozens of 6 a.m. uphill 400s required by his mentor, Bill Bowerman,
Oregon's famed coach. Knight says that Bowerman was "part genius, part
madman the best coach I ever had," and as every MBA student of the last
10 years knows, it was Bowerman's fascination with customizing what he
considered to be the inferior shoes his runners wore that
sparked Knight's Stanford business school term paper about a
running-shoe start-up. After graduating from Stanford, Knight became a
certified public accountant, and it wasn't until JFK was shot--Knight
recalls that many young child-of-the-'50s accountants from
upper-middle-class homes were asking, "What's the point?"--that he
began haunting high school track meets on weekends, the trunk of his
green Plymouth Valiant full of Tiger brand footwear manufactured by the
Onitsuka Company of Kobe, Japan.

Knight ran Blue Ribbon Sports out of a storefront hole-in=: the-wall
next to the Pink Bucket Tavern in working-class Portland. Still a
part-time employee himself, he hired a full-time salesman, a California
kid named Jeff Johnson, who had been a middle-distance runner at
Stanford Johnson had majored in anthropology, but like many other
collegiate-level runners, he didn't see how he could hold a job and
still do what really mattered in life--which was to run.

From the beginning Knight's animating idea was to promote high-quality,
low-cost Japanese shoes, at a time when high quality was rarely
associated with Japanese products, and to eventually displace Adidas,
the triple-striped German shoes worn by all serious track and field
athletes at the time. Johnson and the other runners who joined Knight's
team say the Adidas representatives at track meets used to come by the
Blue Ribbon card tables stacked with shoes to laugh at them. "It was
true geekdom," says Nelson Farris, one of the few original employees
who still work for the company. "All kinds of people work here now--
assuming, of course, that you love sports--but back then we were all
running geeks who didn't fit in."

"It was a way to continue a life-style and still make a living," says
Knight.

Four years after Onitsuka began incorporating Bowerman's design ideas
into its novel nylon Tiger --1 shoes, Johnson came upon the idea of
calling the company Nike. Johnson says the image of the Greek ~ goddess
of victory came to him in a dream in 1971. Retired now and living alone
in rural New Hampshire--one of a dozen millionaires from the original
gang--Johnson says he regarded Knight as a second father.

Bowerman, 82, is a millionaire several times over from his Nike stock
and is now vice-chairman of the board. The public road in front of the
gateway gap in the berm in Beaverton is called Bowerman Drive. Knight
quotes his tough-minded coach every so often, but the Nike figure whose
memory and myth evoke the most palpable emotions among company veterans
is the charismatic and free-spirited distance runner Steve Prefontaine,
who died in a car accident in 1975. Inside the museum room of the Steve
Prefontaine Center, visitors can see display cases holding the yellowed
shoe molds upon which Prefontaine's customized track shoes were made.
There is a letter from the AAU warning Prefontaine to take the word
NIKE off his shirt because it violated rules, which he violated all the
time.

Prefontaine held seven American records when he died at the age of 24.
"To many he was the greatest U.S. middle-distance runner ever, but to
me he was more than that," Knight intoned in a somber voice-over for an
in-house film produced last year. "Pre was a rebel from a working-class
background, a guy full of cockiness and pride and guts. Pre's spirit is
the cornerstone of this company's soul." If Knight is Nike's Walt
Disney, then Pre tainted forever running fast with Sergeant Pepper
sideburns and his hair flowing behind him--lives on as its very own
James Dean.

Not long after Pre died, less serious runners began to hit the roads
alongside the distance geeks, and the Nike variation on the American
Dream soared into the public consciousness. Knight refers to the eight
years after Prefontaine's death as "the halcyon days."

By the mid-'70s Bowerman--apocryphal though the details of the legend
may be--had poured some liquid latex into his wife's
waffle iron one morning before breakfast, thereby inventing the
famous sole that made the earliest Nikes feel like bedroom slippers. 
People who would have had trouble running out of the path of an
oncoming vehicle suddenly wanted to jog in a pair of shoes with this
new impact-absorbing sole.  In 1980 the wild and crazy guys of Nike
pulled in $269 million and replaced Adidas as the No. 1 sneaker company
in the U.S.

In those years Nike nourished a rogue culture that was predicated on
Pre's anti-authoritarian impulses, a determination to work day and
night and an equally impressive determination to pursue a good time
after hours. In a corporate history entitled Swoosh, authors J.B.
Strasser and Laurie Becklund mention beer bashes, a lot of passing out
and throwing up and even a case of executive bed-wetting in pursuit of
separating the company from staid corporate traditions. "Managers drank
and danced and closed the bar every night," Strasser and Becklund wrote
"Even the heads of the company wore jeans and played Frisbee on the big
green lawns." Swoosh carries a photo of Knight during the halcyon days
arriving at a Nike event in drag.

Nike became a publicly traded company in December 1980. Several
families that had pitched in $5,000 each when Knight was scrambling for
capital early on ended up with Nike shares worth $3 million. Those
shares are worth $30 million today.

Not long after the company went public, Nike pioneers sensed a change
setting in. "I felt useless," recalls Johnson. "I'd been elevated about
40 levels above my proper place--designing and selling shoes I was
being wheeled out for corporate dog and pony shows like a museum piece:
'Here's our first employee!' "

So in 1983 Johnson, then 41, left Nike, and he was followed by several
other original employees a few years later "They were all millionaires,
so they didn't have to put up with the frustrations of transition to a
managed company," says Knight.

Not long afterward Nike went into a deep slump. Knight says ~he company
"lost its way." Serious athletes wanted Nikes on their feet, and
company leaders believed that meant their shoes were the best. "Nike
athletes won 65 medals at the 1984 Olympics," says Farris. ' We were
growing by tens and then hundreds of millions of dollars at a leap, but
with no internal changes to back up the growth."

Nike's ace marketing man at the time, Rob Strasser (the husband of the
Swoosh coauthor), was heard to proclaim back then that a serious sports
company like Nike would never "make shoes for those fags who like
aerobics." But Nike employees sitting in airports and looking at feet
on urban streets saw nothing but aerobic shoes - flimsy white ones made
by another upstart company, called Reebok.

In 1986, after Nike had fallen to No. 2 behind Reebok and the stock
price had gone from a high of $28 to less than $7 a share, Knight told
a meeting of his employees in a Portland warehouse, "We just crossed a
billion dollars in sales, but I'd rather be the president of a great
$500 million sports and fitness company than the head of a badly run
billion-dollar sneaker company.

Four hundred employees were laid off, and by the end of the 
year, 275 more were cast out. The second layoff in particular seemed to
knock some of the child out of the company. Bowerman's Lombardiesque
observation that "nobody ever remembers of Number 2" was repeated
often, and the raucousness was replaced by a determination never to get
blindsided again.

By the time of "the transition," between 1985 and '87, Jordan had
signed on, and Knight had decided to put the shoe show on
national TV.  Nike's grass-roots basketball man at the time, Sonny
Vaccaro, says that at first, Knight and his wheeler-dealer adviser on
athlete promotions, Howard Slusher, didn't even want Jordan on their
team. However, the running boom was fading fast, the NBA was becoming
increasingly marketable, and consumers tended to wear their court shoes
on the street.


The idea of Air Jordan was to create a "segment," a marketable package
linking the shoes, colors, clothes, athlete, logo and most important,
inspired television advertising that would set the other elements of
the marketing machine into motion. Air cushioning technology developed
for runners was built into the Jordan shoes, and though the famous
first model wasn't much technically, the segment idea worked.
Eventually Air Jordan was joined by the Air Force segment, designed for
players like Barkley and Robinson, who hit the court hard. The Air
Flight segment was designed for players who imagine themselves as~
deerlike leapers and dream of flying across the lane like Pippen.

The new marketing machinery pulled technology across divisional lines
again in 1987 to invent cross-trainers, shoes designed for people who
participate in a variety of sports. That same year Nike appropriated
what many observers still believe to be a sacred item from another
cultural realm, the Beatles song Revolution, to promote running shoes.
Bo, according to Nike, could "do anything" in '88, and in '89 Bo quite
simply knew. Whatever a consumer wanted Bo to know, he knew. "Just Do
It" had been inserted in the popular brain pan in '88, and for any "it"
an American wanted to pursue, Nike had the right pair of shoes.

The never-quit credo of Bowerman, the athlete-against-the establishment
ethic of Prefontaine and the lessons of Reebok's rise are discernible
everywhere in a Nike corporate world dominated, nine to one, by
employees who weren't on the payroll during the layoffs and who, for
the most part, were children when Prefontaine was killed. Only Knight
utters the officially proscribed word fashion, because fashion is a
Reebok term. "We say design instead," says Knight. Nike employees who
leave for other shoe companies often become nonpersons. A majority of
the current employees claim never to have read Swoosh. After all, one
of the authors is married to Strasser, who left Nike a few years back
and now runs Adidas USA.

A recent survey showed Nike to have the highest levels of understanding
and acceptance of company policy ever recorded by the national firm
that conducted the study. Members of the Nike corps of EKlNs--shoe
experts in their mid-20's who travel from store to store to talk to retailers about the technicalities of new
Nike shoes--are known to tattoo a Nike swoosh on some part of their
bodies, usually a foot, but not always.

A Nike old-timer of 37, a serious sub-200-minute marathoner named Tom
Hartge, stood in front of a blackboard one morning, trying to explain
the company's latest version of "the matrix," a free-ranging system of
corporate governance designed to mediate the romance of an
entrepreneurial past and the mundane requirements of a big company.
Hartge, the company's divisional marketing manager for running, is pure
Nike, so much so that colleagues often say he embodies "the heart and
soul of Nike." He reads' track magazines, trains on the Jeff Johnson
track and refuses to drink a beer made in one of the local
microbreweries, because it is partially owned by the apostate Strasser.
And he knows as much about running shoes as anyone in the business.
Nike still dominates the running category in the U.S., but it is now
only the fourth-largest category at Nike. (basketball is first,
cross-training became No. 2 in 1990, and, surprisingly perhaps, the
mini-Air Jordans and little Agassi shoes have made the kids division
No. 3.) Along the top of the blackboard Hartge listed Footwear,
Apparel, Advertising, Sports Marketing and Retail. A "silo" descended
below each category indicating all the work and workers in each area.
"My job is to influence everything that goes on across the matrix,"
said Hartge, drawing a line into and through each silo. "I'm an
influence broker."

Those who "bounce around the matrix," as they say at Nike, soon realize
that the capacity to influence others is the key to intracorporate
success. Hartge talks about "lobbying" various internal constituencies
to get things done. People who don't "like to get in other people's
faces," as one executive puts it, don't do well at Nike.

Over in the Jordan building a 32-year-old designer named Bill
Worthington held up his latest invention and stared at the object as he
spoke. "It took nearly seven months to happen," he said "It took a lot
of screaming and team-building and refusing to give up. There was
skepticism over whether the consumer could appreciate its technology or
understand its . . . personality."

The startling shoe in Worthington's right hand looked like the hoof of
some great purple, silver, black and green beast. Deep grooves
subdivided the sole of the shoe into separate pods--a word that comes
up often at Nike. The pod idea cooked up by the techies down in
advanced product engineering is intended to replicate the natural
design characteristics of the 26 bones, three arches and innumerable
ligaments and muscles inside the foot. A zebra-skin pattern ringed the
cross-training shoe below several arrangements of designer synthetics
that were glued or sewn to the "oxidized-green"-colored shoe.
Worthington pointed out a huge Velcro strap designed to replace the
laces, and another strap that led up to yet another silver, black and
purple Velcro strapping device at ankle height, this one an
"anti-inversion" apparatus designed to keep athletes from turning their
feet inward while airborne and breaking bones or straining ligaments
when they land. A former industrial design student, Worthington decided
to call his new baby Air Carnivore. "I'd played around with shoes
inspired by dinosaurs before," he said. "I imagined calling one the
Air-Odactyl. But the idea of the Carnivore was to make something that
looked more like an animal than a man-made consumer product."
Nike's chief shoe designer, Tinker Hatfield, a former world-class pole
vaulter, likes to say that one's mission within the matrix includes a
"license to dream," to shock and dazzle the company's developers, who
field the design concepts and shepherd them along a sampling process.
That process extends from Beaverton to China, Argentina, Indonesia and
South Korea As press and labor-group criticism of Nike's business
practices abroad has increased, the company's public-affairs officials
have emphasized that from the beginning Knight envisioned designing
shoes for athletes in Oregon and having them made in Japan. Moreover,
only a handful of the departed 65,000 U.S. shoe-manufacturing jobs that
the Made in the USA campaign's anti-Nike rhetoric referred to in 1992
were ever connected to Nike.

"We're not gouging anybody," Knight says. "Our gross profits are around
39 percent, right on the industry standard. We make our profit on the
volume. A country like Indonesia is converting from farm labor to
semiskilled--an industrial transition that has occurred throughout
history. There's no question in my mind that we're giving these people
hope."

But when Nike points out that its 2,800 rupiah ($1.35) entry level
daily wage in Indonesia is five times that of local farmers, it is
comparing factory wages to farm incomes, only a very small portion of
which are cash. Explaining the cost of molds, packing, freight and
hefty duty fees--or pointing out that the U.S. never had an
infrastructure of high-tech athletic-shoe manufacturing, and that all
athletic-shoe companies are in the same boat--is not always satisfying
to a public that's reminded daily of the fat endorsement contracts Nike
has with scores of athletes.

Nike presents its foreign factories with a set of standards that
include antidiscrimination clauses and demands for health-care
programs, but enforcement is difficult to monitor. For Nike, wages in
the third world remain subordinate to the creation of high-quality
shoes that can be sold for reasonable prices. As long as that is the
case, the foreign-labor controversy--for Nike and any other U.S.
company that manufactures products abroad-- will not go away.

The designers in the Jordan building know that the average pro soccer
player runs 10 kilometers during a match. They know that Jordan runs
about 2 1/2 miles per game and that after an average leap he lands with
a force that's three times his body weight. (Barkley comes down with a
force that's seven times greater than his weight.) Because tennis
players often drag their toes when they serve, Nike technicians helped
develop a material that can be placed against an abrasion wheel for
3,000 cycles without wearing down. When wearers of the first generation
of all-purpose cross-trainers complained that the soles of the shoes
wrapped around the pedals of their mountain bikes, Nike technicians
came right back with the Air Revaderchi, a shoe with a thermoplastic
shank that permits the sole to bend only one way.
"You can't create an emotional tie to a bad product," Knight has said,
"because it's not honest, and people will find that out eventually."
But Knight adds that one of the lessons of "the hard times" during the
1980s is that "what the shoe looks like is important. We didn't put any
emphasis on what those outside Nike call fashion then. We thought that
looks didn't matter." 

"I designed the Carnivore for serious athletes," says Worthington.
"When it comes out, there won't be any advertising, and there won't be
an athlete to help promote it. The shoe"--he turns his invention
pod-side up--"will have to sell on its merits. People will tell each
other about the Carnivore. They'll say, 'Here's a new shoe that
represents the aggression of sports.' "

III. The Show

Deion Sanders slouched in a wooden chair set in the middle of Aloha
Stadium in Honolulu, yawning so long and loud into his lavaliere micro-
phone that the sound technician had to adjust the volume. Neon Deion
was heavily accessorized on this day before the Pro Bowl, sporting dark
sunglasses, gold bracelets, rings, earrings and a cap trimmed with a
Nike Swoosh. On the ground below Sanders were a pair of high-tech shoes
from the new Deion-endorsed Air Diamond Turf line-- gold-mesh,
jet-black-and-white cross-trainers the guys in the Jordan building came
up with after considering Sanders's 18-carat jewelry and his affection
for black Lamborghinis.

In the stadium Sanders said the earpiece he was wearing reminded him of
his days working in a fast-food outlet. "But minimum wage didn't cut
it," he said. "I wanted"--yawn--"the finer things in life."

"I'm Tom Phillips," a voice suddenly reported in Sanders's earpiece,
"category marketing manager for cross-training."

Phillips was speaking from the Nike booth at the sporting goods
industry's annual Super Show in Atlanta, where it was five hours later
than it was in Hawaii. As Phillips went on about Nike's desire to
"satisfy all the needs of its athletes," to render them as "something
more than figureheads . . . part of a big family effort," Sanders began
to wake up and assemble a presence suitable to the moment. By the time
Phillips had introduced Sanders to a handful of elite conventioneers
among the 96,000 who had come to the mammoth Atlanta show at the Omni
Center, Sanders's boyish grin was duly affixed. It was showtime in
Nikeworld, and when the red light went on in Hawaii, Sanders was
laughing and smiling "via satellite" and more than ready to explain
that "playing two sports makes me feel like a kid, like kids who play
their sports all year round," and to announce that he believed in his
heart "you got to look good to play good."

Outside the multimillion-dollar environment that 65 Nike employees had
unpacked from four railroad cars and numerous semis, the sporting-goods
bazaar seemed to go on forever. The show covered 25 acres, and
everywhere you looked--more than any other single sporting thing--there
were shoes. Nike ads dominated displays on walls at the Atlanta airport
baggage area Nike images lined billboards along Interstate 85 on the
way into town. The Nike team had turned the ballroom at the Omni Center
into a shrine to "The #1 Sports and Fitness Company in the World.~This
reference to Nike's dominance vaulted in huge letters across the
entrance to an escalator leading to the mazelike sound-and-light show
that was the Nike outpost in Atlanta.

Exhibitors at the four-day Super Show are not allowed into the enclosed
booths of other manufacturers. Indeed, most members of the Nike army in
Atlanta tended to avoid anything beyond the most casual contact with
competitors. This was sometimes difficult for veterans because--as with
General Motors, Sears and IBM in their heyday--former Nike employees
have seeded the entire athletic-shoe and apparel industry with talent. 
Jim Moodhe was Nike's first sales manager and one of those who became
rich when the company went public. Moodhe retired from Nike a year
later, at the age of 34, to drive race cars and, he says, to pursue
other "Walter Mitty dreams." Now he is the president of Guess Athletic,
one of a dozen or so brands that reside on the tier below Nike and
Reebok.

Instead of offering Bo in person or Deion by satellite, Guess featured
Anna Nicole Smith, the model from the Guess apparel ads and current
Playmate of the Year. "From the crumbs that fall off Nike's plate you
can catch $300 million to $400 million worth of yearly sales, which
isn't ha!f bad," Moodhe said. "The trick is to find a niche where they
don't dominate."

It was during the Super Show that Adidas USA announced that Strasser
was taking over. He would be joined in his effort to revive Adidas by
Peter Moore, the designer of Nike's original Air Jordan line and of
many other Nike shoes. "Adidas people were the Huns," Johnson noted
from his retreat in New Hampshire when he beard of Strasser's move. "I
would starve to death before I'd work for Adidas."

Over at the Reebok booth the vice-president of research and
development, the vice-president of sports marketing, and the
vice-president of advanced product research were only a few of the
onetime Nike people working for "the R company." Said John Morgan, who
is now Reebok's vice-president of product marketing for sports and who
worked for Nike for 14 years, "As soon as you leave, you Bet a lesson
on friendship. People I worked with turn their beads when I see them in
the hallways. Some of my closest friends in the company don't return.
my phone calls anymore. It's crazy because when you boil it all down,
what we do is about sneakers."

As Nike is in so many ways an organizational and philosophical
reflection of Knight, Reebok is the brainchild of Paul Fireman, a
former salesman who decided to acquire the right to sell Reeboks in the
U.S. at a trade show in 1979. Within a decade he had run sales from
$1.5 million to $1.8 billion, a rate that in percentage terms surpassed
Nike's growth. Knight clearly considers Fireman a late entry and
something of a faker, a pretender. Most Nike employees believe that
Reebok people don't really care about sports and that Knight loathes
Fireman for being less than authentic and for what Reebok did, however
briefly, to cause Nike's layoffs.

Knight also believes that Reebok and Fireman were behind a 1990 call to
boycott Nike by Jesse Jackson's Operation PUSH. Nike's Oregon officials
were unfamiliar with Chicago-based Operation PUSH when the group first
demanded that Nike award contracts to minority businesses and hire
blacks in proportion to the business it did in black communities. The
episode became public after Nike held a private meeting with PUSH
officials, at which PUSH maintained that Nike had no black
vice-presidents or board members, which was true, and that it sold 40%
to 45% of its products to black consumers. Nike countered with sales
records indicating that 13% of its sales were to minority customers. In
the end polls revealed that the public supported Nike three to one. The
boycott fizzled, and Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson, who is
black and was already under contract to Nike, was soon thereafter named
to the Nike board.

Nike's feud with Reebok is so intense that Jordan says he zeros in with
a special intensity upon Reebok players like Dominique Wilkins and
Shaquille O'Neal. "But this thing is between these guys," says Jordan,
referring to Knight's visceral feelings toward Fireman and Strasser.
"It involves things that we can't even know about."

When it was recently suggested to Knight that the demonization of a
competitor might be a serviceable management and morale-building tool
within the company, he grinned. "Especially when it's real," he said.

IV. The Hero Factory

The day Bo's dire medical prognosis led the Kansas City Royals to cut
him two years ago, Jackson telephoned Knight. "I just want you to know
I'm going to play baseball again," Bo said.

After the pain caused Jackson to quit a comeback attempt with the White
Sox the following season, he phoned again. "I'm going in for a hip
replacement," he said. "I promise I'll be back." A few years earlier
Knight had been infuriated when some Nike executives had taken it upon
themselves to pay $100,000 for an endorsement deal with a kid from
Alabama who could have played pro football but opted for minor league
baseball. Two years later, in 1988, after Jackson had distinguished
himself as an NFL running back while playing only half a season with
the L.A. Raiders, Nike began promoting Bo as nothing less than "the
world's greatest athlete." Shortly before Jackson phoned Knight with
his pledge to play again, a Nike executive advised Knight that the hip
injury meant "Bo won't be able to tie his shoes," let alone play pro
sports in them. But to Knight, Jackson had proved himself the very
essence of a Nike guy.

The "Bo Knows" campaign begun in 1989 remains Knight's favorite.
Jackson helped Nike sell historic numbers of shoes. That Bo was a tough
kid who was headed for trouble before turning to sports, and that he
was now determined to come back from an awful injury in defiance of
conventional analysis, made him even more of a Nike guy. What's more,
if the pathos of a successful comeback could be harnessed for marketing
purposes, Bo might be even more promotable. "We're with you, Bo,"
Knight said on the phone.
Shortly thereafter Nike marketing executives helped coordinate a new ad
campaign that spoke directly to the hip injury Jackson's stats in
spring training this season were updated daily along the grapevine in
Beaverton, and when Bo hit a home run in his first at bat on Opening
Day at Comiskey Park, Nike took out a full page in USA Today that said
only BO KNEW.

In 1992 Nike spent some $250 million to create consumer desire through
the association of products and sports, but this combined ad and
"promo" (the in-house term for endorsement deals) budget does not
include the huge royalties paid to some athletes when their signature
products take off. Two decades ago the meager contracts offered Nastase
and Portland Trail Blazer Sidney Wicks for wearing Nikes stretched the
corporate budget. A decade ago the $100,000 a year paid to McEnroe was
considered scandalous. And when Falk negotiated a $3 million, multiyear
Nike contract for Jordan two years after that/ it looked like the
endorsement coup of the century.

These days Jordan rakes in more than $20 million a year from Nike and
at least another $21) million annually from other endorsement deals.
Jim Courier's interlocking guarantees from Nike might make him $26
million over four years. Agassi, who has been under contract to Nike
since he was 16 and gets a $2 million-per-annum guarantee plus a
royalty on certain items, is said to have been infuriated by Courier's
numbers.

"The size of the payments to coaches is what's gotten all the attention
lately," says Knight. The first coach we ever paid was [former Oregon
basketball coach] Dick Harter, in the '70s. After two or three years of
trying to get shoes on the school, we heard that he had a deal with
Converse for $2,500. So we said, If that's how it works, we'll pay him
the $2,500. The whole March Madness phenomenon took off on TV, and the
numbers went up."

"The whole thing happens on TV now. A few years back we were extremely
proud of a novel, three-quarter-high shoe we'd developed. But we only
sold 10,000 of them the first year. Then John McEnroe had ankle trouble
and switched to the shoe. We sold 1 l/2 million pairs the following
year. The final game of the NCAA basketball tournament is better than
any runway in Paris for launching a shoe. Kids climb up next to the
screen to see what the players are wearing."

Strasser used to say that "each sport has a separate dream, and we must
design shoes that address each dream." But since 1987, as Nike has
changed from a shoe company into what Knight and the others have called
"a marketing organization," the strategy has been to ascribe to each
dream a Nike association that often entwines premier athletes with a
pair of shoes.

The work of drafting, balancing and maintaining the Nike endorsement
team--and the trick of matching athletes with new products and new
imagery--requires a particular, almost metaphysical vision of the
sports landscape. If Nike is going to spend millions "presenting its
athletes as whole people," as Knight has put it, taking the time to
hang out with them and build them flashy shoes that conform to their
personal tastes and obsessions (as Sanders's cross-trainers reflect his
jewelry and Courier's fascination with baseball is the basis of his
clothing line), the company says it can't afford some bland Mark Spitz.
"When I scout and draft a Nike basketball team," Howard White recently
told a gathering of sports marketers in Beaverton, "I'm looking for
attitude and style. If I were pulling together a competitive basketball
team instead of a Nike team, I might need a great center, a player like
a Brad Daugherty. He'll get everybody involved and help you win. But a
player we draft has to represent something. We consider elements of
style. Does he excite anyone? If he can't move people and offer a
certain attitude, then he just won't do much for us as an endorser."
Nike guys don't have to be nice "Every time McEnroe throws a racket,"
Strasser used to say, "we sell more shoes."
For every baby boomer who believes he or she has grown up with the
straight-shooting Nolan Ryan or one of the serious track stars
projected by Nike, and thus is offended by the behavior of Barkley or
Agassi, there is a younger Nike consumer who is inspired by displays of
attitude. But when Nike realized that the anti-country-club, rock 'n'
roll tennis imagery projected by Agassi was turning off older players,
it created the toned down Supreme Court line, grabbed Courier with an
estimated $3 million-plus signing bonus and designed a solid but warm
campaign that would play up Courier's newfound maturity while
projecting the energy and spirit he is often thought to lack.
Late this spring the consensus in Beaverton was that this year's NBA
draft class would be thin on future superstars of Nike aptitude or
attitude. Bobby Hurley, the feisty guard from Duke, certainly
interested the company, as did Kentucky forward Jamal Mashburn and
Michigan forward Chris Webber. But the Nike basketball stable was
already full of talent, and with only a few exceptions the players were
high-profile veterans. Perhaps the only missing piece was a heavily
hyped rookie known as Shaq, who wasn't a Nike guy anyway

Only six, or seven college basketball players are invited to formally
tour the World Campus each year and witness a Nike presentation, and
only Shaquille O'Neal, who was a star at LSU when he took his tour last
year, ever showed up in Reebok gear and yawned during the sports
marketing team's elaborate spiel. O'Neal had told various agents and
marketing types long before leaving college that he had his own ideas
about his image and endorsement future. He had no intention of
competing with Jordan, Barkley and the others already at Nike for money
and air time. So he signed a $15 million, five-year deal with the R com-
pany and went on to sell the Shaq umbrella marketing concept to other
corporations for millions more.

Everyone at Nike seems to hope O'Neal fails miserably. Shaq--as any
Nike secretary or sales rep from Beaverton to Pusan can tell you--is no
Nike guy. "He's not a Nike guy because they don't have him," says Sonny
Vaccaro. "What's a Nike guy? They got Nike guys in prison, too, you
know. This stuff is ."

Although Nike executives consider the 1993 NBA draft crop uninspiring,
their competitors do need new stars. So the marketing team gathered in
the McEnroe building before the draft knew that Fila, Puma, Pony and
some of the smaller companies were probably out to bag a signature
star. One passing consideration was for Nike simply to corner the draft
by signing up all the top players. But what would the public think of
such a power play? No recent Nike tactic has raised more eyebrows among
the sports business cognoscenti than the creation of its nascent sports
management program, which reflects an effort to exert control over the
images Nike casts into the marketplace. Nobody in Beaverton was pleased
to observe the dilution of Jordan's Nike-clad image by the addition to
his portfolio of Gatorade, McDonald's, Wheaties, Chevy, Hanes and other
products.

But for Knight the decision to take action came when he first saw
Agassi hawking Canon cameras on TV. When Agassi looked into the camera
and said, "Image is everything," Knight flipped. "It was 180 degrees
from our imagery," says Knight. "We work hard to convey that
performance, not image, is everything."

The sports management program was born shortly thereafter. "This whole
sports marketing thing's just gotten bigger and bigger," says Knight,
"and the sports agent business is changing. Sports agents came out of
an era when a guy making $1()(),000 was a well-paid athlete, and the
agent was a fringe lawyer or a guy with a huge passion for a sport. On
a $100,000 NBA contract the agent got $4,000. Now you get $120,000
agent fees for a single contract and another million for an endorsement
of which the agent gets up to ~0 percent The incentive to fragment an
image is huge, and when you split it up too often, nobody wins."

Nike's first sports management client was Bo. As with Jerry Rice,
Pippen, Sanders, Ken Griffey Jr. and Tim Hardaway, Jackson is a
"marketing only" client. Nike pays him a yearly guarantee for the right
to okay all his endorsements and nonteam marketing-related activities.
Nike negotiated contracts with Pepsi for Bo and with Coke and
Montgomery Ward for Pippen, for whom the company even did a "Scottie"
candy-bar deal. Jordan was approached to join the new management
program. "I told them that while I understood their feelings about
control, they'd have to compensate me for what I could lose," says
Jordan. "That ended the discussion."

The controversial "career management program" now includes only three
athletes rookie quarterback Rick Mirer of the Seattle Seahawks; the
Miami Heat's high-bounding young guard, Harold Miner; and Mourning,
whose NBA debut this season was overshadowed only by the presence of
Shaq. "Five years from now maybe I will say we should have gotten
Shaq," Knight says. "You rolls the dice and you takes your chances. Af-
ter all, I am the guy who said a college player named Magic Johnson's
professional future was in doubt because he was a player without a
position. Remember that we didn't have Magic, and we didn't have Bird,
and we still did pretty well."

For Mourning--who was drafted No. 2, after Shaq--the decision to allow
Nike to select an agent to handle his contract with the Hornets, direct
his financial affairs, forge his public image, manage his charitable
activities and negotiate and control all his ancillary marketing
agreements was something like the son of a military man joining the
Army. At 23, Mourning is a Nike man young enough to have grown up as a
Nike kid. He attended Nike summer camps and played in Nike high school
tournaments.

As a high school sophomore Mourning was befriended by Vaccaro, whom
Mourning considers to be one of the most important figures in his life.
Not only did Mourning attend a Nike college, but to this day he is
mentored by Thompson, the Georgetown coach and Nike board member.
Vaccaro and Nike were widely criticized when Mourning decided to enroll
at Georgetown, because it was assumed that Nike's close relationship
with the Hoyas and Thompson had informed the decision.

In 1978 Knight had hired Vaccaro to establish a grass-roots basketball
presence for the company. Nike quickly struck deals with a network of
high-profile coaches. Some of them, like Thompson and Jerry Tarkanian,
who was at UNLV at the time, were soon being paid six-figure yearly
sums.

In 1991 USA Today noted that Vaccaro was being called "the most
powerful man in college basketball"--and it was around that time, says
Vaccaro, that "Nike got rid of me. I never dreamt in my wildest dreams
that I wouldn't be with Nike all my life. But as I told Phil recently,
I was like the gunslinger brought into Dodge City to clean up the bad
people. In this case the had people are the other shoe companies. Once
I got rid of them, the good people realized they didn't need a
gunslinger anymore."

However, with the advent of the sports management program, Nike
gunfighters were back on the street. Mourning was shocked by negative
reaction to his business arrangements during his holdout with the
Hornets. ' People actually got mad at me because of who I worked for,"
says Mourning.

"Control is sensible, but overall management isn't smart for Nike,"
says Mark McCormack, whose packaging of Arnold Palmer as founder of the 
International Management group is
considered the first endorsement coup of the modern sports-business
era. "Phil's killing an ant with a machine gun here. I endorse his
desire to be more involved in marketing Nike superstars and in
controlling what they're doing, but taking it to the extent he has will
be complicated down the line. Agents and managers are going to be less
inclined to sign athletes with Nike just to keep them away from the
web."

Mourning talks regularly to White, Nike's pro basketball guy, and he's
in daily contact with a Nike sports marketing executive. When Mourning
recently said that he was thinking of buying some new television sets
for his house in Charlotte, Nike arranged to have them brought in. "All
I have to do is work hard on the court, and Nike will take care of the
rest," Mourning says.

With only a few weeks left before the end of the regular NBA season,
Mourning was nervously awaiting news about his first Nike commercial,
which was tentatively scheduled to run during the playoffs. Charlotte
teammate Larry Johnson was already on TV all the time, slam-dunking as
a grandma in a dress for Converse. Mourning was indeed working hard on
the court, and members of the Nike rank and file were tracking his
rebounds and points and comparing them with Shaq's.

Still, there was the not insignificant matter of the commercial. 
"Clearly Alonzo's dream is yet to be realized," says David Falk. "But
he's with the company that can do it--Nike really can make him a
household name. The fact is, though, Michael is one of the reasons
Alonzo might have to wait."

So Mourning waited anxiously for his script to arrive, for his chance
to take the court in prime time during the playoffs, and for those
magical 30 seconds when the Nike hero machine would take him up and
away.

V. The Store

In Newark, 3,000 miles--and a world away--from Beaverton, the broad
thoroughfare called Market Street crosses Halsey and is suddenly a bloom
with startling colors and noise and urgent circles of shoppers. Along
the sidewalk across from the empty shell of an old Macy's, the huge
crowd mills on Sneaker Row, staring at the overstuffed picture windows
of Bros. Sneakers, the Sneaker Room, the Sneaker Joint, Dr. Jay's
Sneakers and a veritable metropolitan museum of athletic shoes, the
Essex House of Fashion. On Market, news of the back-room unpacking of a
new model from one of the big shoe companies can cause a stampede. Most
of the regulars on Sneaker Row are young, and in a city in which truan-
cy rates reach 49%, the athletic-shoe stores are often full of kids in
the early afternoon.

A beleaguered-looking 38-year-old named Steven Roth has, for 18 years,
served the citizens of Newark from the l0,000 square feet inside the
Essex House of Fashion. Roth rings up sale after sale from behind a
long counter set in the middle of a quarter acre of shoes and athletic
apparel. Beside Roth, working the next register, stands a much larger
man wearing gold chains and a bright green sweatshirt that is heavily
"strapped," as they say on urban streets, his black nine-millimeter
pistol lodged in a shoulder holster attached to his broad chest.

Roth converses easily with his young customers in a patois of street
argot and shoe slang. Some 1,000 connoisseurs of athletic shoes come
into the store every day, but he still seems to know most of the kids,
if not by name, then at least according to aesthetic preference. "Very 
nice," Roth says, holding up a pair of top-of-the-line basketball shoes
Rockean Sanders, the 16-year old who plans to buy the black shoes,
leans over toward Roth to admire their lines and contours. Rockean has
spent more than an hour analyzing "the wall" before choosing his new
shoes, and the wall is monopolized by Nikes.

The racks near the front of the store display dozens of examples of
Nike apparel, and a large display case offers posters of Barkley, Bo,
Deion and the other gigantic Nike images that make so many shoe stores
look like miniature halls of fame. Nike's visual and economic dominance
of the Essex House of Fashion is largely a testament to the company's
marketing prowess but also to the fact that Roth is yet another Nike
guy. In many ways his loyalty is as important to the company as is that
of all but a few of the athletes on the payroll

"I get insomnia at night, so I get up and call Nike, just to talk about
a shoe I need or to ask a question," Roth says, ringing up yet another
sale. "Somebody who knows what's what is on call for me 24 hours a day.
Nike sales reps have these computers that can show me a whole line of
shoes on the screen. A rep can spin a computer image of the shoes
around, change them into all the colors they'll come in. He can even
show me the commercials that will support the shoes on TV. I can call
Nike up on a Wednesday and tell them I need fill-ins of a hot model,
and by the weekend they'll come in. No other company can do that.
Nike's been good to me, so l push their shoes. It's as simple as that."

Though many of Nike's 12,000 retail accounts fear the spread of the
opulent Nike Towns that the company says are meant to be
brand-promoting, 3-D commercials--if Nike makes $12 on a $100 shoe sold
to stores for $50, then it's not lost on retailers that in a wholly
owned Nike Town the company makes $62 on the same shoe--a Sporting
Goods Dealer survey of 500 retailers shows that Nike remains their
favorite brand. But none of the high-tech, high-speed corporate support
would mean a thing unless kids spent more time in front of Nike's
section of the collective wall than any other. Americans under the age
of 25 account for more than half of Nike's sales and for more than 75~o
of the: basketball-shoe market Research indicates that six of 10 sales
are made because of something that happens between the eye, the will
and a shoe--right there at the wall.

"I go to Chicago, New York, Paris, Tokyo and Minneapolis," says Nike's
chief protector of corporate look and visual images, Gordon Thompson.
"I go to gyms and playgrounds and see how the kids customize the
strapping with our Velcro fasteners. We made a lot of the shoelaces
longer because of lacing styles favored by the kids. All the kids leave
the tags on certain shoes, like the Air Raid, so we've made the tags
look nicer."

When dozens of newspaper articles set the stage for a 1990 report in SI
about urban youths killing one another to get at Air Jordans and other
coveted shoes, public outrage focused on a shoe industry that had
spawned such a surfeit of unrequited desire that people were willing to
commit murder over something as meaningless as a pair of sneakers. An
acquisitive culture that had bypassed the larger moral implications of
stealing and killing over objects as apparently essential as cars was
evidently enraged because of the absurdity of the motives involved. 

These reports of violence, as well as the abortive Operation PUSH
boycott, have left Nike defensive about accusations that it targets
poor, urban black kids for marketing initiatives. ' We don't target a
market to a demographic," says p.r director Dolan 'But we do sell to
psychographic segments--such as people who love only basketball. We
sell to passions and states of mind, not by age, address or ethnicity "

Recent target-marketing campaigns launched by some of Nike's
competitors (notably British Knights' campaign for its Predator
basketball shoe. i Wear the Predator, or be the prey") are f~r more
aggressive than anything Nike has done. But as long as the possibility
of standing in Barkley's or Jordan's shoes captivates the imagination
of Americans for whom $130 is a significant sum, questions of social
responsibility will be part of Nike's weekly agenda. "I don't get it
says Mourning. "I grew up seeing kids steal all sorts of things. Is
Nike supposed to make unimpressive shoes because some people can't
afford the best products?

That the shoes are magical items to one segment of the economy in the
way Apple PowerBooks are to another may offer an insight into the
social and economic order of the moment. But those closest to the urban
scene rarely contend that the problem is the shoes. "What people who
live in other places don't understand is that there's a part of America
where a Big Mac is a celebration, says Roth as he sends one kid after
another away from his counter wearing a giddy grin.

All afternoon kids have streamed through his store, surrounding certain
new shoes and commenting on them with curatorial care and insight.
"Most of the people in this store, their lives are s--  their homes in
the projects are s--, and it's not like they don't know it," says Roth.
"There's no drop-in center around here an~ more, and no place to go
that they can think of as their own. So they come to my store. They buy
these shoes just like other kinds of Americans buy fancy, cars and new
suits. It's all about trying to find some status in the world."

Vl. The Dream

Brian Clare, a 25-year-old Nike EKIN--EKIN, as senior executives often
seem embarrassed to point out~ is Nike spelled backward--says the honor
of being invited to the Final Four in New Orleans was right up there
beside the day he met Jordan. Clare was one of only four EKIlNs
rewarded this year for their loyalty to the cause with a ticket to the
Final Four. Clare sold insurance after college, and he worked in an
athletic-shoe store for a while. But then he landed what he calls his
"glamorous and completely cool" job, driving hundreds of miles each
week from store to store, talking all day about Nikes.

In New Orleans, Clare met Dean Smith, the legendary coach of North
Carolina; he saw Jordan's face projected onto a huge building near the
Superdome; and he noted the requisite airport and highway billboards
that propelled Nike into every vista. Clare says he felt as if he were
part of "some amazing force."

From another vantage point the Nike profile at this year's Fin~I~Four
was comparatively subdued. Converse, a relative fossil seeing
competitors from the Nike perspective, had taken a full page ad in
U.S.A. Today, boasting that three of the four teams would be clad in
Cons. Only Michigan would be sporting Nikes. 'That was our game,~l
Vaccaro said of his own Nike years. "We had all four teams one year,
and we laughed at the world."

Vaccaro held forth in New Orleans alongside Strasser from an Adidas
suite one floor above the Nike suite in the same hotel. The Vaccaro and
Strasser reunion at Adidas was the talk of New Orleans--at least among
shoe guys and sports marketing insiders--until word went around that
Knight and Nike had also made a move. Mike Krzyzewski, the respected
coach of Duke and a longtime Adidas endorser, had struck a deal with
Nike. The piece of the rumor that lit up the Final Four cocktail
circuit was that Krzyzewski would get a million-dollar signing~ bonus,
a $375,000 to $400,000-per-annum multiyear contract and lots of Nike
stock options. The deal would rank among the most lucrative ever struck
between a shoe company and a coach, and the general reading of the
story was that Knight had decided to send a message to Strasser as he
and Vaccaro set out to revive Adidas. "Hell," said Vaccaro, "I'm not
going to have a million dollars to spend on promotional deals all year.
Adidas is like a pimple on Nike's rear end Only Reebok can go
head-to-head with Nike."

Sports marketing director Steve Miller admitted that the timing of the
Krzyzewski announcement reflected a Nike proclivity for public
orchestration, but he endeavored to point out that what was being
called the "the Krzyzewski deal" was really a deal between Nike and
Duke. The new trend for us, Miller explained, is to hook up "near
exclusive sponsorship deals with whole universities"--as Nike is in the
midst of doing with Southern Cal. As contracts with competing
manufacturers run out, USC's football, basketball, tennis, volleyball
and track teams will all be clad in Nike gear. "This is our new
thrust," said Miller. "The money goes to the universities, and they can
distribute it to coaches themselves. If the institution keeps some
money for itself, we think that's the way it should be."

The Nike juggernaut raced through the first half of.the year, striking
deals, trying to make everything go faster. Record annual earnings were
announced in July, with domestic sales up 10%--about what was expected,
and essential because the overseas theaters were bogging down due to
poor currency exchange rates and the European recession. If the goal of
$1 billion in sales by 1996 is to be reached, then international sales
must increase steadily. Meanwhile, women in America will be the focus
of a heavy national advertising campaign. The outdoor fitness market--
hiking and trail-running shoes and the like--is another growth area in
which Nike sales have doubled over the past year (to $123 million), and
they are expected to surge.

In February, Nike heralded its recent purchase of the cash strapped Ben
Hogan golf tour, one of the less prominent PGA circuits but one that
has nurtured many top players. Golf-related sales account for only $32
million of Nike's $4 billion income, and its golf business has been
relatively weak, but Knight believes the sport is "well run" and worthy
of Nike association. During a mass conference with golf writers
gathered to ask about the Hogan venture (now known as the Nike Tour),
Knight bristled at the implication that Nike was after the upmarket
types who play the sport. "That's like asking if we go directly at
inner-city kids with our basketball line," he said. "We just do it to
be in the sport. That's what we do."

In mid-April, in the wake of an agreement to outfit the entire Kenyan
track team, a Kenyan runner sporting the new Nike colors (but still
wearing his old Asics shoes) won the Boston Marathon. But the end of
the month brought new indications of the tenuousness--the "fragility,"
as Knight always puts it--of an enterprise based on the fortunes and
even the moods of athletes.First Bo Jackson stunned executives by
refusing to participate in a new ad campaign designed around his hip.
Then Sanders, distraught over scant playing time with the Braves, a
dragged-out salary negotiation with the team, and the death of his
father, suddenly decided to stop playing baseball. Trouble was, more
than half a million pairs of the nifty gold-mesh cross-trainers-- each
shoe bearing Sanders's number with the Braves and the Falcons--were due
to arrive in the stores in mid-June. "This," Knight observed, "is
turning into an interesting May."

In early June, after Deion had returned to the Braves, the matchup in
the NBA Finals more than compensated for the company's failure to
monopolize the Final Four. Four starters for the Chicago Bulls and four
for the Phoenix Suns were Nike endorsers. Jordan, Barkley and even Dan
Majerle commercials were on the air before the Finals began, including
a Barkley - "role model" ad in which Charles says, "Just because I can
dunk a basketball doesn't mean I should raise your kids."


That stark message was joined by a more self-involved-sounding
soliloquy from Jordan "What if my name wasn't in lights?" Michael said
in the ad as he stood alone in a gym, shooting one free throw after
another. "Can you imagine it? . . . I can."

Jordan doesn't like to do commercials right before the playoffs, but
when he saw the copy, he thought the message conformed with his growing
ambivalence toward celebrity. Jordan says that what he really wanted to
say in the spot was, "Aside: from all the commercialism, the game's
still fun." The ad also conveyed a get-off-my-back attitude, and the
ingratitude some perceived in the spot was complicated by Jordan's
furious reaction to reports that he had lost huge sums gambling on
golf.

Just before one postseason Fame Jordan laced up a pair of the 1994 Air
Jordan prototypes during a morning practice, and from a lone, murky
photograph of the new shoes in one local newspaper, 300 people called
the Chicago Nike Town to ask when the shoes would be in stock. However,
in stores like the Essex House of Fashion, Air Jordan was taking a hit.
"It's not just the gambling stuff," said Roth. "The kids talk about
Michael's problems, but for two months it's been all Barkley. The Air
Force Max is hot, and from this level it looks like Air Jordan is
finished."

Mourning had finished the regular season ranked 15th in the NBA in
scoring, 14th in rebounds and fourth in blocked shots, and he had
waited patiently to star in his own Nike commercial. But when the
company executives saw the creative package offered by Wieden &
Kennedy, the Portland agency that has done most of Nice's advertising,
they told the copywriters to try again. So Mourning entered the
playoffs without a signature commercial. Despite his brilliant efforts,
in particular against the New York Knicks in prime time during the
second round, he would have to wait to be elevated to a household name.

In late July, Steve Miller and the other Nice sports marketers were
still jockeying to sign Chris Webber and Anfernee Hardaway to shoe
contracts. Jamal Mashburn had taken a $6 million dollar contract plus a
red Ferrari to go with the Italian shoe company Fila. Bobby Hurley had
signed up with the Foot Locker retail chain, which had promised him a
signature shoe as part of its new ITZ (In the Zone) line.

The University of Miami joined the Nice "total university relationship"
camp, and as part of a deal that would mean several hundred thousand
dollars to the school--during the same week the Air Carnivore arrived
at the Essex House of Fashion--the University of North Carolina joined
the new-look Nice fold. Longtime Converse coach Dean Smith reported
that he had put the matter to a vote among his senior players.

Meanwhile, projections of single-digit growth in 1994, instead of the
double-digit increases Wall Street has come to expect, sent the value
of Nice shares down to $56 from a high of $90 only a few quarters
earlier. Knight said Nice's response would be to continue its '
relentless strategy" to invest abroad and "strengthen the brand."
"We'll keep pushing wherever we can," says Knight, "because an
essential part of this culture says that we're a growth company. The
idea of Nice as some sort of stable, slow-growing~ high dividend-paying
company doesn't compute around here."

Senior executives talk of Nice's becoming "an experience company~ and
an entertainment corporation of the future. They talk of a Nice theme
park loaded with digitized virtual reality booths in which participants
can virtually experience the best golf holes in the world or go
one-on-one with Jordan or those who come after him. An alliance with
director George Lucas's Lucasfilm is in the works to develop futuristic
sports entertainments. "Retailing and entertainment are moving
together," Knight says. If you look at Nice Town, at the talent we have
and at the sports agency business, you can see new directions."

Knight says he also wouldn't rule out buying a team or other
sports-related companies, if promoting, protecting and controlling the
brand and Nice's carefully wrought image is the result. During the
first week in August, Phoenix Sun owner Jerry Colangelo announced that
he was trying to draft Knight as a co-owner of a franchise that would
bring major league baseball to Phoenix. Meetings have also been held to
discuss a Nice-backed pro basketball league in Asia, and the company
has even floated the idea of sponsoring a college football national
championship playoff. "But I do want to stop fighting so much with
governing bodies and leagues," Knight says. "It's easier to fight when
you're the little guy. Even though we still think the old way, being
Number One means that you simply can't fight all the time. We have to
start waiting for the really big fights."

In the spirit of the company's more raucous days. Michael Doherty, the
in-house filmmaker, began to clown around one morning while hosting a
broadcast on the World Campus radio station in Beaverton. "And next,"
Doherty said, "maybe we can get Phil Knight to come down here and tell
us just what he does with all his money." Knight's vast wealth (despite
the companywide knowledge of his penchant for sponging dollars and
quarters off people at lunchtime) has turned him into a corporate totem
in sunglasses, still crazy after all these years at the helm.

At the time Doherty was joking about Knight, the chairman was sitting
up in his posh corner office, where he prefers visitors to remove their
shoes. Knight's suite in the McEnroe building has rice-paper-style
walls and cases full of Oriental objects that his contacts in the Far
East have given him over the years. Displays of sporting images
observable on every other wall in Nikeworld stop at the entrance to
Knight's office, where blond wood, black-lacquer trim and elegant
sconces take over. In a conference room next to his office, the sole
indication of commercialism is a tiny piece of rock shaped like a
swoosh.

Knight says he rarely thinks about the power implicit in his control of
the Nice machine. But sometimes it's unavoidable. "I went to the
Australian Open last year," he says, "and I decided to walk to the
grounds. I turned a corner, and there, stretched across one of the
biggest buildings in Melbourne, across the whole skyline it seemed, was
a huge JUST DO IT banner. I thought, God, coming from Portland to
Melbourne and seeing that it l was an enormous thrill."

During a June sales meeting in Beaverton, Knight appeared in a skit
doing an imitation of Marlon Brando in The God Father. "The most
powerful man in sport" sat in his study like Brando in the famous
wedding scene, supplicants approaching one after , ~ another to kiss
his ring and ask for favors. Agassi, McEnroe and Courier appeared on
film from the French Open, bowing to the Godfather's demand that they
play Davis Cup. Krzyzewski appeared, and Penn State football coach Joe
Paterno pranced onto the stage to complain to the Godfather that he'd
been a Nice coach from the beginning. Later, during part of a skit
spoofing the Village People's song YMCA (N-l-K-E), Knight appeared on
stage again--in leather and chains.

In other companies such jests might serve to demythologize the leader
for the good of morale, but at Nice a certain ritual irreverence is
promoted as an inoculation against an encroaching bureaucratic style
that would make Nice too much like the soulless monoliths beyond the
berm. The reversions to a bygone corporate style seem designed to
obscure the fact that Nice is entering middle age. The vast majority of
U.S. companies are younger than Nice, and these contrived rituals of
the corporate tribe cover up the laugh lines, like a pair of high-tech
wraparound shades.

Knight misses the halcyon days. "Those entrepreneurial days were more
fun, he says. "lt's still fun, but only a few old-timers are left who
are friends of mine."

One senior executive tells of a recent day when dozens of employees sat
at the tables on a patio overlooking Nice's seven-acre man-made lake.
Knight came up with his lunch tray, and though the executive said he
had finished eating, Knight said, "Just stay awhile. I don't know
anybody here."

A few weeks later Knight was strolling along the Walk of Fame beside
Howard White. "So, Howard," Knight said, "what's a building that says
John McEnroe on it going to mean to people in IQ years, when Mac's been
retired for a decade? What will the Michael Jordan Building mean in 10
years, when Michael's been retired for--what?--a year or two?"

White's eyes bulged at the implication that Jordan would still be in
the NBA for another eight years or so.

"Well, here's what I think," Knight continued without waiting for an
answer. ~'I think that in 10 years it will mean a lot that today
Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player in the world. And I
think John McEnroe has put an imprint on tennis that nobody will ever
take away. You might not like it, but it's there I believe that some
things people do never really fade away."

And all around Knight, striding along quickly with gym bags and
PowerBooks, the young turks of Nikeworld went back to work, to race
toward a finish line that simplyas the Nice axiom so famously has it-
-isn't there.

--

    Source: geocities.com/athens/Acropolis/5232

               ( geocities.com/athens/Acropolis)                   ( geocities.com/athens)